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ART; The Sun Sets at the Tate Modern

THE Tate Modern in London recently suggested extending the wildly successful six-month run of Olafur Eliasson's installation in the museum's vast Turbine Hall. An instant cult site of mood-altering atmospherics, both gloomy and eye-popping, ''The Weather Project'' consists of a fake sun (yellow lights behind a huge semicircular screen, below a mirrored ceiling) and pumped-in mist.

Mr. Eliasson thought about the offer, then declined. ''The time after a show is just as interesting to me,'' he said the other day, ''because then it becomes an object of memory, and its meanings change.'' Tate officials might not be so philosophical. The project, which ends today, has been a huge boon to the museum. Mobs of winter visitors have lain on the cold floor and gazed up at their pale reflections, basking in the artificial sun and fog. The work became one of those pop-culture events, like ''Survivor'' or the Academy Awards or the Tate's own Turner Prize: spectacle and tabloid news, its popularity almost transcending logic.

It seemed like a good moment for Mr. Eliasson to reflect on the fuss. Thrilled but circumspect about the reaction, he is by temperament a skeptical Scandinavian type. Half Danish, half Icelandic, he is not given to expressions of simple contentment, not with a stranger anyway. ''I am trying to maintain in my mind an open discourse about its qualities of consumerism and spectacle,'' he says. ''I would like to think that the spectator became the center of this piece, that the project twisted the Tate so the people who came to visit were what the art was about.''

At 36, likable, unshakably solemn, bespectacled and compact, with a slightly graying beard, Mr. Eliasson may not immediately seem like the sort of person who would dream up extravagant feats of illusion and theatricality. In Venice, at the recent Biennale, he turned the Danish pavilion into a fun house of jerry-built expressionistic architecture, with crystalline spaces full of mirrors, peepholes and colored lights.

Previously, he has erected a fake sun, about 41 yards in diameter, like a billboard, on the skyline in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He designed a waterfall that flowed upward. He dyed various rivers in Europe and America green (eco-friendly dye, naturally). And in Bregenz, Austria, he transformed a museum into a greenhouse of mossy pools, footbridges, fog, dirt, wood, fungus and duckweed. Fascinated by the effects of disorienting optics and eccentric geometry, he also removed the windows of the ironwork skylight in the gallery of his New York dealer, Tanya Bonakdar, a few years ago and installed mirrors to create a dizzy walk-in outdoor-indoor kaleidoscope.

His work is in fact very much an expression of his background and character. It's serious. Landscape components partly reflect his Nordic roots. Like Ibsen and Strindberg, writers he admires, Mr. Eliasson is, he says, after a kind of fleeting experience that is theatrical but at the same time transparent about its artifice. He is adamant that the Tate display is not about creating a convincing illusion, in that he lets a visitor see the lights behind the screen and the seams between the mirrors -- gives them a peek backstage, as it were.

The mirrors have another purpose, too. ''I put mirrors on the museum ceiling to change the history of the Turbine Hall, which previously had sculptures in it, and to create a different experience, a place that looked even larger than it is, emphasizing the megalomaniacal ambition of the architects and the institution,'' he explains. ''The mirror, not the sun, is what people are really staring at: so the work is not so much the general spectacle of a fake sun, but a person's individual encounter with his own reflection.''

Or put another way, Mr. Eliasson's work is about landscape and theater -- about the fuzzy border between nature and culture. He likes to cite the French philosopher Henri Bergson, for whom vision was a mechanical act by the eye dependent on the aculturated use to which we put sight. (''The visible outlines of bodies are the design of our eventual action on them,'' was Bergson's phrase.)

Mr. Eliasson explains ''The Weather Project'' in Bergsonian language: ''I wanted a subject that implied 'community' and that was open-ended. Predicting weather is one way we collectively try to avoid the unforeseeable, which our lives are always about. The weather is a subject about which a community may also permit a high degree of disagreement: I can say 'I hate the rain,' you say, 'I love it,' and you may still think I am a nice guy.

''I'm not interested in weather as a matter of science,'' he continues. ''I'm not a meteorologist or a botanist. I'm interested in people: how people engage sensually with the qualities of weather -- rain, mist, ice, snow, humidity -- so that through their engagement they may understand how much of our lives are cultural constructions. We have a desire to assume that certain things, like our reactions to the weather, are natural, but they are in fact cultural, and the end result of this can be entrenched ideologies, which we take to be inevitable. This is the path toward totalitarianism.''

He rethinks that remark after a moment. ''I shouldn't have insisted that everything is cultural and not natural, because that is as dogmatic as the reverse. I should have said that the line separating nature and culture changes through history, and this is what we should be aware of.''

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Mr. Eliasson cites the ubiquity of white walls in art galleries: ''Chalk is white and chalk was used as a disinfectant and so early modernists decided on white walls as symbols of purification, clean spaces. But if chalk had been yellow maybe all our galleries would be yellow today, and we would interpret yellow as a neutral color.''

His heroes, not surprisingly, include the light artists James Turrell and Robert Irwin, although Mr. Eliasson sees them as illusionists who don't reveal how the illusions happen. He admires the utopian architects Buckminster Fuller, Bruno Taut and Frederick Kiesler. To that list might be added kindred figures like Daguerre, Moholy-Nagy, Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan Graham -- diverse artists who dreamed up spectacular designs, artful production numbers that became predecessors to what Mr. Eliasson devises in his studio here.

The studio is a laboratory, he likes to say, and it sort of resembles one. In a corner, several colored glass discs, lights, a cube and a spirograph globe spin like disco balls for a prospective project in Paris. There's also an archery target (Mr. Eliasson shoots arrows to relax), a terrarium, a net to catch golf balls (he's an 18 handicap) and various neatly packed cables, fans, screens and theatrical lights.

At 60 feet square and 20 feet high, with a basement and three offices next door, the studio occupies part of a former storage building for the German railway. The artists Tacita Dean and Thomas Demand share space in it.

Mr. Eliasson employs a crew that varies in size depending on what he has going on but hovers at around a dozen people. One of them, Einar Thorsteinn, a slender, gray-haired architect, mathematician and crystallographer, a former friend of Buckminster Fuller's and a fellow Icelander who has been working with Mr. Eliasson for some time, stops into Mr. Eliasson's office at one point with a prototype for some shelves. The shelves are inspired, Mr. Eliasson explains, by Czech expressionist design. Blurring the line between architecture and art, in the tradition of Kiesler and Moholy-Nagy, as he points out, Mr. Eliasson has been toying with furniture design lately. ''It is a collective process,'' he says. ''I set the task. Other people in the studio come up with models and then I make the final decision.''

Assistants also prepare lunch, consumed commune-style at a long refectory table. Mr. Eliasson exempts himself from the cooking. ''I'm a terrible cook,'' he says, ''and besides I pay them.''

In the basement, carpenters build models. Little paper dodecahedrons are scattered across a desk. There are unconstructed parts of a Buckminster Fuller dome. ''If I'm lucky, I'll turn it into a big snowball, frozen minus-20 with ice inside,'' Eliasson explains. And bottles of liquid smoke, leftovers from the Tate project, are stacked on shelves. ''There are dozens of different kinds on the market and we tested pretty much the spectrum of them to get the proper distribution of light through the mist and also to avoid a mist that might ruin the Monets if it seeped into the galleries,'' he says, deadpan as usual.

He's headed to London now to disassemble the work and store it, after which he says he'll take some time off. There are currently Eliasson exhibitions in Oslo and Iceland, and a show of his photographs coming up in Houston, not to mention projects to complete for Aspen and Philadelphia.

But he and his wife, a Danish art and architectural historian, have just adopted a child, from Ethiopia, and art, he says, will take a backseat briefly. ''If you become successful, you can do too much and then you compromise the quality of your work,'' he says. ''I don't want that to happen. Besides, I just want to digest everything. It's a good moment. I feel like I'm on a roll.''

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A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2004, on Page 2002030 of the National edition with the headline: ART; The Sun Sets at the Tate Modern. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe